How Do You Get Your Ideas: The Girl Who Doesn’t Pee

The question I get most often as a science fiction and fantasy author is: Where do you get your ideas? This article is the 16th in a daily series for Medium, analyzing the thought-by-thought process of coming up with the ideas for the daily fantasy blog about the girl who lives in her father’s dreams, The Squashbuckler Diaries.

Today’s Idea: The Girl Who Doesn’t Pee

In today’s daily slice-of-life, 4-year-old Joy and her father, Justin, sneak aboard a pirate ship. They want to stow away so that the Red Pirate can lead them to his secret base. Joy wants to hide alone inside a barrel and Justin can’t talk her out of it.

“What if you have to pee?” he asks eventually. She exclaims that she never has to pee. It makes him laugh. He keeps on arguing. He finds out from her that she never has to poop either. No matter what he says, she denies it, and he eventually loses.

Like I said, this is a slice-of-life, meant to teach us about who Joy is and what it’s like to live in the dream before the book comes out early next year.

Now let’s get to how I came up with the idea.

Where the Idea Came from

Joy is based on my 3 daughters who are all, each in her own way, as spunky and hard-headed as Joy. I create slice-of-life pieces of their lives together rather than just be content with writing the Lost in Dreams books about her life, because I want this to be a perfect album of their childhood, their teenage years, and their adulthood.

So I try to borrow as heavily as I can from real life.

And here’s real life: This morning, the youngest daughter, 3.5 years old, decided as a joke to wear a diaper. She hasn’t needed one in ages. It’s the only diaper that’s still at home, used by her to dress dolls up when she feels like it.

When her mother and I told her she couldn’t go to kindergarten with a diaper, she insisted. When my wife asked what if she needed to pee in the kindergarten, she got the reality-altering answer: “I never have to pee in kindergarten!”

This is only the last in a string of reality-altering statements, and it’s usually a sign that she will not change her mind, no matter what.

I thought that was a great thing to say, and put it in the back of my mind, thinking I had to write a Squashbuckler Diary about it. It would be great to show the readers who Joy was as a young girl — illuminating the building blocks of a girl who would later become a heroine.

So when I sat down to write it I had the argument between Joy and Justin all ready. I will just use the one that happened in real life, with slight exaggeration. Now I just needed a situation that would justify such an argument.

My first thought was that Joy would want to go into a barrel that went over a gigantic fall. But that didn’t fit the argument I had planned.

My second thought was that Joy would be inside a barrel that would be delivered to a deep underground city… but no, that had a lot of logistical problems that I didn’t want to get into.

My third thought: They would look for hiding places aboard a pirate ship.

My fourth thought: Yes! Now I just needed to find good hiding places.

My fifth thought: They could hide in the life boat. Okay, that would be Justin’s choice.

My sixth thought: Joy would want to hide in a tight barrel away from her father. Then the argument could start with Justin not wanting Joy to be alone. (“I want to be alone!”), moving to what if she got scared (“I never get scared!”), and eventually resorting to asking what if she had to pee (“I never have to pee!”).

And that was it. That was the idea: Justin would want to hide in the lifeboat and Joy would insist on hiding alone in the barrel.

The idea was ready and I wrote it. You can check it out here.

In Conclusion

The whole point of the fantasy blog is to create an album of our real lives while creating the building blocks of a future fantasy heroine. A real-life statement from one of my girls got me interested in mimicking it for Joy, the girl who lives in her father’s dreams. From that point on it was trial and error until I found the perfect setting to replicate the real life argument and exaggerate it.

Join me tomorrow as I share how I came up with another idea in this daily fantasy epic.